The Internet provides access to a wide variety of content items, e.g., video and audio files, web pages, and news articles. Such access to the content items has enabled opportunities for targeted advertising. For example, content items can be identified to a user by a search engine in response to a query submitted by the user. The query can include one or more search terms, and the search engine can identify and, optionally, rank the content items based on the search terms in the query and present the content items to the user (e.g., according to the rank). The query can also be an indicator of the type of information of interest to the user. By comparing the user query to a list of keywords specified by an advertiser, it is possible to provide targeted advertisements to the user.
Another form of online advertising is advertisement syndication, which allows advertisers to extend their marketing reach by distributing advertisements to additional partners. For example, third party online publishers can place an advertiser's text or image advertisements on web pages that have content related to the advertisement. As the users are likely interested in the particular content on the publisher webpage, they are also likely to be interested in the product or service featured in the advertisement. Accordingly, such targeted advertisement placement can help drive online customers to the advertiser's website.
The serving of the advertisements can be improved by evaluating the effectiveness of the advertisements. One technique for evaluating the effectiveness of an advertisement is to survey an audience for advertisement recognition and brand linkage after an advertising campaign has run. The measure of advertisement recognition can, for example, be based on the percentage of a survey audience that recognizes the advertisement, and the measure of brand linkage can, for example, be based on the percentage of the survey audience that correctly identifies the featured product and/or brand of the advertisement. An advertisement can be brand obfuscated, i.e., branding and/or product information can be removed from the advertisement, and an audience can be surveyed to measure the brand linkage and advertisement recognition. Post-campaign ad effectiveness studies may show, for example, whether online user behavior as manifested by web site visitations and search activity have increased due to the display of ads. The experience gained in one ad campaign may be used in designing future ad campaigns.